On Sat, 17 Apr 2010 23:33:48 +0100, you wrote:
I think in all fairness to examiners that in a way they have an impossible job due to the fact that what is a clever idea to one programmer will be a trivial idea to another: the field is so huge and people have such different experiences.
In US patent law, algorithms themselves were deemed unpatentable quite some time ago (I believe that European patent law is more liberal in that regard, but I don't know all of the details). So a lot of the discussion concerning software patents in this country has been on whether or not software can be considered to be an "invention" separate from the underlying algorithms used in its construction. Since those of us who work with software realize that software is often little more than a restatement of an algorithm in a way that is suitable for a computing device to "understand," it's very difficult to draw a clear line between the two. People do occasionally come up with truly novel ideas about how to perform some software task, but it seems to me that unless the novelty involves some aspect that can be separated from the algorithmic approach used, it shouldn't be patentable. For example, quicksort, though certainly novel, is purely an algorithm, so it shouldn't be patentable--it is completely independent of any "tangible" implementation. But a sorting technique that is optimized for large datasets that can't be held entirely in volatile memory, and explicitly takes advantage of known characteristics of disk latency, etc., could very well be patentable. -Steve Schafer